CEV pushed back another year Options

[ilbasso]

Now won't fly before September 2014....
CNN article

[dvandorn]

All I'll say on the topic of the thread is that no one ought to be surprised that a manned vehicle development program is taking longer than the initial work flows had projected. Not a single manned vehicle has met its initial flight readiness dates -- I know that this includes the Americans and the then-Soviets, and I suspect it's also true of the Chinese.

Mercury flew manned two years behind schedule. Gemini flew a year and a half behind schedule. Apollo flew two to three years behind schedule, and Shuttle flew between two and three years behind schedule. Skylab was between one and three years behind schedule, as well, and I imagine the early Salyut program flew behind its initial schedules, too.

I actually thought that Mike Griffin did a good thing by setting the 2013 internal goal. His mission is to get Orion flying by 2015; the 2013 date is pretty much what you had to set in order to actually meet the 2015 date.

I'm sure there are any number of people here who have worked on managed projects with deadline dates. Haven't you all been on projects where the deadlines are set well ahead of the true drop-dead dates, just to ensure that the *real* dates could be made?

There are still some sticky technical issues to be overcome, to be sure. But I don't get the feeling that this news is either a critical blow to the program *or* unexpected.

-the other Doug